The space outside the physical walls of the Hundred-Floor Demon Trial Pagoda was an endless, unrendered desert of silent gray polygons.
Standing upon the invisible ledge three feet beyond the southwest corner of Floor One, Lin Tao reached into his collar. Then he drew his land-mapper metal pen. He tapped the star-white-gold needle against his teeth. He felt the faint, high-hum of test data streaming through his eye nerve.
In his left eye, the world was stripped of all cosmetic trick.
The towering black-iron facade of the pagoda didn’t exist out here. To the world engine’s outside rendering pipeline, the hundred-story monolith was simplified into an ultra-low-polygon crash hull. A massive, segmented spire of dark wireframe lines designed to prevent physics entities from escaping into the memory void.
And running along the outside outer edge of that wireframe hull was an unintended stone-built ancient object.
A nonstop, spiraling crash plane.
The Precursor master builders had built the pagoda’s physics boundary. Then, they hadn’t modeled single ledges for each of the hundred floors. Instead, they had wrapped the outside structure in a single, nonstop spiral ramp tilted at an angle of fourteen point eight two degrees. It climbed like the thread of a huge star-iron screw, winding around the outer edge of the spire all the way from Floor One to the summit.
